Status Updates From Legado de cenizas

“American marines were siding with the Christians, American jets were dropping bombs on Muslims, and American ships were lobbing one-ton shells into the hills of Lebanon without knowing what they were hitting. The White House had gone to war in the Middle East with no idea of what it was getting into.”

“Throughout 1969 and 1970, Nixon and Kissinger focused the CIA on the secret expansion of the war in Southeast Asia. They ordered the agency to make $725,000 in political payoffs to President Thieu of South Vietnam, manipulate the media in Saigon, fix an election in Thailand, and step up covert commando raids in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.”

“We harvested a lot of lies,” said Robert Barbour, the deputy chief of the American embassy’s political section. “Some of them we knew were lies. Some of them we didn’t.”

“We came to power on a CIA train,” said Ali Saleh Sa’adi, the Ba’ath Party interior minister in the 1960s. One of the passengers on that train was an up-and-coming assassin named Saddam Hussein.”

“The CIA’s practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy—and in many other nations—for the next twenty-five years.”

Part 2 ✅